n, or not been, for you 'all over the place,' and of everyone's also
being, for you, on the chatter about it. You go by that in respect to
Long--by your holding, that is, that nothing has been noticed; therefore
mustn't you go by it in respect to _her_--since I understand from you
that everything has?"

"Everything always is," Mrs. Briss agreeably replied, "in a place and a
party like this; but so little--anything in particular--that, with
people moving 'every which' way, it comes to the same as if nothing was.
Things are not, also, gouged out to _your_ tune, and it depends, still
further, on what you mean by 'extravagant.'"

"I mean whatever you yourself meant."

"Well, I myself mean no longer, you know, what I did mean."

"She isn't then----?"

But suddenly she was almost sharp with me. "Isn't what?"

"What the woman we so earnestly looked for would have to be."

"All gone?" She had hesitated, but she went on with decision. "No, she
isn't all gone, since there was enough of her left to make up to poor
Briss."

"Precisely--and it's just what we saw, and just what, with her other
dashes of the same sort, led us to have to face the question of her
being--well, what I say. Or rather," I added, "what _you_ say. That is,"
I amended, to keep perfectly straight, "what you say you _don't_ say."

I took indeed too many precautions for my friend not to have to look at
them. "Extravagant?" The irritation of the word had grown for her, yet I
risked repeating it, and with the effect of its giving her another
pause. "I tell you she _isn't_, that!"

"Exactly; and it's only to ask you what in the world then she _is_."

"She's horrid!" said Mrs. Briss.

"'Horrid'?" I gloomily echoed.

"Horrid. It wasn't," she then developed with decision, "a 'dash,' as you
say, 'of the same sort'--though goodness knows of what sort you mean; it
wasn't, to be plain, a 'dash' at all." My companion _was_ plain. "She
settled. She stuck." And finally, as I could but echo her again: "She
made love to him."

"But--a--really?"

"Really. That's how I knew."

I was at sea. "'Knew'? But you saw."

"I knew--that is I learnt--more than I saw. I knew she couldn't be
gone."

It in fact brought light. "Knew it by _him_?"

"He told me," said Mrs. Briss.

It brought light, but it brought also, I fear, for me, another queer
grimace. "Does he then regularly tell?"

"Regularly. But what he tells," she did herself the justice to declare,
"is not